A serendipitous trip last week to a bookstore got me one gem of a book - 'The Peter Principle - Why things always go wrong'. This 179- pages book (paperback) was originally published in 1969 when American corporations were the envy of the whole world. In the aftermath of diversification mania and foreign expansions, several organisations were left inundated with people and management ranks. 'Hierarchisation'had taken roots and had started spreading its tentacles all across; consequently, incompetence was rife.

'The Peter Principle' was a colloborative effort of Dr. Raymond J. Peter and Raymond Hull. Dr. Peter, according to the book, was a social scientist who had done enormous research in studying incompetence and hierarchies. Raymond Hull, an author-cum-journalist took the cue from Dr. Peter, improvised upon his work and published it. The Peter principle states that in a hierarchy, every employee tends to rise to his own level of incompetence. He even goes to the extent of stating that only those workers accomplish work who haven't yet reached their level of incompetence. The point is that people are promoted for doing good work in their respective roles. And those good employees, in this race towards the top, sometimes get placed in a role that is in stark contrast to the one that helped them get promotion in the first place.  

These assertions are further backed up with apparent exceptions to the Peter principle - a) percussive sublimation: a pseude promotion. This one's very common. Management often kicks an incompetent employee upstairs to a position where he could do least damage (a corollary to the Dilbert principle). Besides, such promotions firm up the morale of people and maintain the hierarchy, too, b) Lateral Arabesque - Another management trick whereby you may not get any promotion or a raise, but instead may be bestowed upon with a high-falutin title, c) Peter's Inversion - Authors use the metaphor of 'professional automatons' to explain this exception. There are often people in an organisation for whom nothing is more important than toeing the seniors' line. According to Hull these people are often managed by incompetent managers who care about sychophancy, courtesy towards bosses, etc. more than one's internal efficiency, d) Hierarchical Exfoliation - Super-competence is more objectionable than incompetence. Super-competent employees often get stuck in their ranks since they tend to disrupt the work system and e) Paternal In-step system: PIS is exhibits itself when a favored individual enters a hierarchy over others instead of starting at the bottom. In current times, this phenomena is noticed predominantly in family-driven organisations.

Chapter 4 and onwards take the readers through various manoeuvers that exist in hierarchies. Raymond Hull touches upon nearly every facet of hierarchiology. He talks about how  push (employees taking vocational courses to accelerate promotions) doesn't have an edge over pull (acquaintances in top levels of hierarchy) since in the former, seniority factor is a crucial factor than academic credentials. Then, there is this chapter titled 'Health and Happiness at Zero PQ' where PQ=Promotion Quotient. Hull explains when an employee reaches his level of incompetence, more times than not, he's unaware of it and keeps on basking in the glory of his last promotion. Such employees sometimes become phenomenal in substitution techniques instead of focussing upon their KRAs. Authors, for example, mention a few of those techniques like spending awful lot of time in preparation of a task than the task itself, focusing more on side-issues, working more on one's image than performance,  specialising in a narrow field of work, etc.

On balance, 'The Peter Principle' has several positives and a few negatives, too. No book in my knowledge beside 'The Peter Principle' deals so thoroughly with issue of incompetence in hierarchies. You would actually identify yourself with a lot of examples in the book. I could relate to quite a few of them. As far as negatives go, I would say that author(Raymond Hull being the prime author) at times goes overboard with the hypothetical examples; in some parts, witty aphorisms seemingly suppress the rational portion. Still, I would recommend this book for its relevance to the hierarchical incompetence issues. Not to mention it's an easy read. I wish we had a modern day sequel, if you will, to this book.  

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